David Little: Memories go up in flames along with the forest

I walk into the wilderness to escape problems, but sometimes problems come to the wilderness.

What happens when a wild place you love is destroyed? I remember when an herbicide spill from a railway accident on the upper Sacramento River killed every fish in the river for 45 miles. Trout fishing on the upper Sac was a big reason I moved to Redding in 1990. When the spill happened, I drove up to the place where two weeks earlier I had caught and released the biggest trout of my life. There were thousands of dead fish in the water and on the bank. All I could do was stand there and cry.

The river recovered, many say, but I don't go there much anymore. It's just not the same for me.

I was away for a few days of ocean fishing last week and as I returned on Sunday, I was learning that many of my favorite places were on fire. Places like Eiler Lake, East Fork Coffee Creek, Russian Peak and Shackleford Creek mean little to the average person, but I've humped a backpack into each place and spent quality time there.

On Coffee Creek, there's a place called Hodges Cabin. It's four miles from the nearest road, the only human-made thing for miles. It was built by a rich man from Los Angeles as a vacation home in 1923. Unlike most spartan century-old cabins in the wilderness, it has two floors, a concrete swimming pool, a cold spring that runs a Pelton wheel generator, a treehouse and something like 12 miles of telegraph wire back to the town of Trinity Center so Walter Hodges could check the stock market.

I loved the place so much the first time I hiked there, I went back the next summer and did a full-page story for the Redding Record Searchlight. That was almost 20 years ago.

On Tuesday, as the 5,000-acre Coffee Creek Fire was growing, smokejumpers were called in to protect the cabin. They beat back the flames and saved it.

The fire kept heading north, though, into Doe Lake and Granite Lake. Doe Lake is where I was laid up with a hyperextended knee for two days. I hurt it while striding downhill with a 40-pound pack on. Not smart.

I iced it for two days, using snow. I cut a tree branch into a crutch and hobbled back to the truck, six miles. My hiking partner was very kind about it. I guess he figured going slow was better than carrying me.

Eiler Lake is just south of Burney. That's where a fire started July 31 that eventually burned through Old Station and Hat Creek. We hiked in to Eiler one time, six of us, for a weekend. It was during the last drought in the early 1990s.

The lake had receded and trout were stranded in a pool you could almost throw a rock across. We named it Trapped Trout Lake. We decided to have a fishing derby. I caught and released 38. Though I'm a fisherman, that's no exaggeration.

The fire in the Russian Wilderness, between the Trinity Alps and Marble Mountains, was started by lightning July 29. It's burning thousands of acres in extremely steep country.

About 10 years ago we went into the Russians for a week. One evening at sundown we sat on granite boulders next to Russian Lake and watched a storm roll in. We stayed there until a bolt of lightning struck a hiking trail in the middle of a ridge about 800 yards away. We decided that might be a good time to take cover.

Luckily, it had been a normal winter. Things were green. No fire started.

Shackleford Creek is the jumping-off point to the Marble Mountains. We've used that trailhead twice for two different weeklong trips. Driving in, you pass beautiful old mining and ranching communities called Mugginsville and Quartz Valley. Both were being evacuated last week by a fire that started from those same lightning storms and spread up into the Marbles.

We sat through an amazing summer storm one night in the Marbles, but things were green then, too. What a difference.

It will be sad to see these places, if I ever make it back. Burned forests can have a strange beauty 20 years later, when the green understory starts to grow again.